Saturday, March 17, 2012
How to Make Curtains in Ten Easy Steps
Step One: Audition for the Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler.
Step Two: Convince one of your best friends to be in it with you.
Step Three: Meet with the director to talk about the set. She showed me the following picture from a church she had visited:Step Four: Fall in love with this design, which is, unfortunately, by someone else. But feel inspired.
Step Five: Despite having to teach, design costumes for another performance, apply to schools, and being generally overwhelmed, agree to create a series of panels for the backdrop. I was inspired by Georgia O'Keefe images, cathedral stained glass, and the idea of using women's work (quilting and applique) for a play about women's voices and experiences. So along with Liz, the director, we visited some fabric stores and picked out gorgeous theatrical looking red fabric, cut it into two panels, and I got started. The original design had three panels, but we were limited by fabric availability at Joanne's. We also scoured Liz's stores of old fabric and local Goodwills. I would have loved to implement some antique fabric from textile work by other women--but time was an issue (I had about two weeks to finish).
Step Six: Liz had told me to remember that the play (and thus the image) should speak to the beauty and the pain of female experiences with sexuality. So my goal was not to create something too soft or too pretty-- there would be sharpness and bitterness as well. I thought about breaking a mirror and sewing the shards on the fabric--I still like that idea--but due to time constraints I ended up using beads to create jagged edges within the folds.
Step Seven: The final look was always a mystery to me, because I didn't have a flat surface long or wide enough to spread out the entire piece at once. So I worked on it in increments.
Step Eight: As I was adding pieces to it, I kept thinking about the language of the play--there are so many references to fish, water, and slippery rocks ("my vagina--a wide wet water village," so I used some gold fabric with red koi on it to break up the red. I also kept thinking about the idea of the vagina being a heart that can bleed for us (from "I was there in the room").
Step Nine: Hang up the two panels in back of a play. When I finally saw them together hanging up and spaced apart, I couldn't get over how much the central image looked like a map of the United States. I liked the idea of The United States of Vaginas, but it was completely unintentional.
Step Ten: Use the panels in my bedroom and living room as curtains.
THE END
Monday, September 5, 2011
This weekend . . .
Thursday, August 4, 2011
What Most of You Do Not Realize about Kitty . . . .
. . . is that underneath that dogmatic and overly fuzzy exterior he is a true romantic at heart! Seriously--he cries at weddings, dragged me to the Sex and the City movie like ten times, and constantly takes up my DVR space with reruns of TLC's Say Yes to the Dress. So when Kitty learned that two of his dearest comrades, Anne and Erin, were preparing to marry, he immediately got to work on creating a truly monumental present. The wedding was May 1, so he instituted his own April Theses, Piece (ed quilt top), (Double Wedding) Bands, and Thread. (Yeah, I know--I told him no one would get the Lenin reference, plus the rhyme was a real stretch, but you try arguing with Mr. Scratchy Bitey). And thus began the Double Wedding Band Quilt, which I recently delivered to Anne in Toronto.
Although featured in the series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (another Kitty favorite), which takes place in the years following the Civil War, there is no evidence of this specific pattern existing before 1928, when Capper's Weekly published a pattern. Other lady's magazines began publishing variations of the design throughout the 1930's. Fabric featuring a printed version of the double rings also became popular. Interlocked rings, of course, had been appearing in German quilts for hundreds of years. (See Carry A. Hall, The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt 1935 (reprinted Dover Publications, 1989.)
Although Kitty acted as chief commissar of the quilt project, as time passed he enlisted the valued labor of Kitty and Wylie. Wylie received appropriate wages and benefits; Bolli, sadly, was sent to the gulag and forced to work for free.
Despite employing this traditional wedding design, Kitty felt that a union of such cool people required a little something extra. He spent a great deal of time googling "Love Poetry" and finally settled upon Poem II from Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich. (After extensive self-debate, he realized that the marriage section of the Communist Manifesto would be inappropriate.) Using quilting thread, he embroidered the poem
text on the quilt top before quilting and binding.
Due to extremely unfair travel restrictions (there may have been some youthful follies the US government may be refusing to overlook) , Kitty was forced to remain south of the border while I received the task of muleing the quilt to Canadia. I also added some finishing touches to the binding before presenting the gift to Anne.
I believe there is a tradition in multiple cultures of adding one mistake in every textile for luck. In that case, Anne and Erin will enjoy luck for the next hundred years! (All the parts I helped with, Kitty!)
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
I Make Food!
I have been using herbs to augment pasta dishes all summer but last night I cooked with garden herbs for the first time. I made simple basil pesto:
Parmesan + olive oil + pine nuts + fresh basil = unbelievable flavorful deliciousness
I know a few handfuls of basil is hardly a victory garden, but the taste of food that you created is pretty special.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Take That, Flash Floods!
Here we have my sad little garden after one of West Virginia's crazy rain storms. My flowers completely drowned in a wave of warm summery rain sloshing out of my drain pipe. Watching the flowers struggling to stay afloat, I remembered all the Little House books where Laura watched her crops be eaten by grasshoppers/ruined by storms/burned by grass fires/trampled by cattle/confiscated by the government. But yesterday I rigged up a technologically advanced (it involved packing tape) drain pipe extender that will confound the flashiest flood.
But on the back patio, the flowers are incredibly lush beautiful. Therefore I took many pictures. Also--peppers!
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Curtains!
The Best Thing I Have Done in Huntington!
Today, I did something unexpected and amazing. I went to a dog show! Like in Best in Show! Huntington boasts its own kennel club, which is somewhat surprizing as it doesn't even have a Petco, but nevertheless, I spent the afternoon petting afghan hounds, basset hounds, mastiffs, and, those crazy dogs who look like mops--it was like Animal Planet came alive and jumped into my lap.
The Komondor is named Ziggy and he won Best in Show yesterday. The French mastiff is named Moses. Also, I love him.
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